I did a bit of a Bear Grylls on it. Normally I have been cycling in and out of the shop, turning the evening home wards trip into a mini interval session on the bike. Rather than cycling in today, I took a lift and brought my running gear with me, so I had no choice other than to wimp out and beg for a lift home.

Monkey business

Essentially being dropped into the virtual 'desert' of Oranmore and having to make my own way out to 'civilisation'. Bear style! I even had my jungle vest and back-pack on to add to the realism of it all.

The planned interval session was 15mins warm up followed by 4 times x4 minutes on and x6 minutes recovery. Expecting to cover 8.5km in 1 hour and 700kcal to be used in the session.

The road from Oranmore to Roveagh has a few ups and downs so there was likely to be some hill work included in the run. Along the Limerick road I was running in the hard shoulder before getting a footpath to run on through Clarinbridge. Turning left into the Brother of Charity estate in Kilcornan I wound my way home.

The last interval was tough as expected, the body was tired and the road runs in an uphill drag through the back woods of the estate. I didn't complete the full of the last 6 min recovery or the 5 min warm down, I did these off the clock at home.

All in all 8.92km in 50:52mins and a 790 kcal burn with average heart rate of 149bpm.

It will be interesting to see how this makes a difference to my 8k race time which is currently 39:27mins recorded in the Maree 8k.